Tuesday, December 26, 2017

2018 - a Pivotal Year

It's my thesis that people are healthy and happy when their needs are met.

When, in October 1994, I started of The Fair World Project, to help create a fair, safe and peaceful world, I put together two 'entry level' essays.

They are both in the papers' section at www.interestfreemoney.org

The second, 'How Rigid is your Paradigm' was/is intended to put the Quaker idea of 'Being open to new light' in secular terms.

The second, 'A Four Component Needs Theory' was intended to list our humsn needs.

In part, this was intended to relate to my thesis, above, and to relate to the proposition ascribed to Karl Marx ( 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs').

But, to reverse that ordering to: 'To each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities.'

In other words, to evolve a 'Needs-based politics' as more useful than a 'Rights-based politics'.

So, that Four-Component Needs Theory is:

Animal needs: food, air, water.

Warm-blooded animal needs: warm clofhing and shelter

Intimacy needs: sex, romance, friendship

Activity needs: constructive activity.

Now, kf course, my friend Richard Wilkinson was on the track if the overall need, which he and Kate Pickett so admirably explained in The Spirit Level: that our over-arching need is to live in a state of equality.

However, the Four Component Needs Theiry, above has an abundance of utility.

For example, it is clear that we suffer, say in the UK, from a deficit, *for all*, of a poverty of social needs.

In other words, of the last two sets of needs.

While it us true that far too many havea deficit of our 'Selfish Needs' (the two sets of animal needs): the needs to sustain 'the physical self', *all* of us suffer the poverty of our Social Needs.

Of course, that's why the Campaigns for Interest-free Money and for Co-operative Socialism contribute wholisticaly as parts of The Fair World Project: the create a global Co-operative Commonweal: The Wellness of All, in The Wellness of All.

All, equally well!

2018 will advance, God willing this: peace and prosperity.

Sustainably for all.

Equally!






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